The Long Shadow (52 page)

Annika got up from the breakfast table and went to sit on the sofa opposite Suzette. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I wrote about it in the paper.’

The tears overflowed. ‘They were, like, so cute. Leo could be really annoying, but he was so little. My was lovely, really lovely. She loved horses, just like me …’ Suzette put her hands to her face and wept for several minutes. Annika sat quietly and waited for her to stop. In the end she wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hands and looked at Annika. Her makeup was smeared all over her cheeks.

‘Hang on, I’ll get you something to wipe your face,’ Annika said, and fetched her unused linen napkin from the breakfast tray.

Suzette blew her nose loudly and wiped the mascara from her cheeks. ‘And Grandma as well,’ she said. ‘She was my best friend.’

Annika sat down again. ‘Astrid, you mean?’

‘She always said I was her little princess, even though she wasn’t my real grandma.’ She blew her nose again. ‘She brought me here the first time. The farm was our special place.’

Annika tried to sound calm and neutral. ‘So you and Astrid used to come here together?’

Suzette nodded.

‘What for?’

‘Grandma knows Fatima well. They do
bizniz
together. And Amira’s the same age as me, and she’s had her own horse since she was four. We used to come and stay here every summer.’

‘Isn’t it difficult talking to Amira?’ Annika asked, even though she knew the answer.

‘She speaks Swedish because her dad’s Swedish. She had Swedish nannies when she was little, and Grandma used to send her Swedish children’s videos.’ Suzette laughed. ‘Imagine, sending
Seacrow Island
to Morocco!’

Annika leaned forward. ‘What’s Amira’s father’s name?’

Suzette frowned. ‘He’s dead. I never met him. But her mum’s name is Fatima and her sisters are Maryam and Sabrina, and Maryam is married to Abbas, and they’ve got the cutest little children in the world, two boys. But Sabrina’s not here at the moment because she’s studying at Harvard, and Amira’s going there as well, as soon as she’s finished her International Baccalaureate exams.’

Annika tried to look as if it was perfectly normal to study at Harvard. ‘Did Maryam go there as well?’

‘No, she did two years in Cambridge, like Fatima, but she wanted to come home and get married to Abbas, so obviously that’s what she did. Fatima doesn’t make anyone do anything. She doesn’t force me either, because I don’t like studying. I’ve got a horse of my own, Larache. He’s a mix of English and Arabian thoroughbred, and he’s the sweetest horse in the world. I want to work with animals and horses, and Fatima thinks that’s a good
idea.’ She nodded to emphasize the point. ‘You don’t have to be top of the class,’ she said. ‘I help Zine and Ahmed – the foreman and his son.’

‘Did Grandma Astrid think it was okay, you working with horses?’

The nodding was even more intense. ‘Of course she did. I mean, Grandma grew up on a farm, even if they weren’t very nice to her there.’

Annika leaned back in the chair and tried to calm down. ‘Did Grandma tell you what it was like when she was little?’

Suzette lay down on the sofa again and threw both legs over the armrest. ‘Sometimes. Her stories were all pretty sad …’ Then she leaped to her feet. ‘There’s a book about Grandma and her friends.’ She spun round and ran to one of the bookcases in the corner behind the breakfast table.

‘A book?’ Annika said, turning to see what she was doing.

Suzette was running her hands over the spines of the books. ‘It was here somewhere … Got it!’ She held up a thin, stitched pamphlet with a white cover, no picture or other decoration, just the title and name of the author. ‘They’ve got all the Emil and Pippi and Goldie books,’ she said, ‘but this is pretty much the only adult book in Swedish.’ She handed it to Annika. ‘I’ve read it. It’s a bit weird.’

Annika stared at it.

A Place in the Sun
by
Siv Hoffman

‘And you found this here? In the bookcase?’ She opened the imprint page. Printed by a vanity press
twenty years ago. Nina’s mother had evidently had ambitions to become a writer.

‘It was where I just found it. There’s no proper system, not like the school library. Everything’s all mixed up …’

There was a noise from the door. Annika and Suzette stiffened. Annika sucked in her stomach and slid the book inside her jeans, then pulled her top over it, hoping it didn’t show.

The young man called Ahmed came into the library, holding his gun in front of him. His eyes opened wide and he shouted something at Suzette in Arabic. She got up, quick as a flash, and slipped past him onto the stone landing. ‘
Allez!
’ he shouted angrily at Annika. ‘
Dépêchez-vous!
’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she muttered. He wanted her to hurry.

It was considerably cooler in the room now. Someone must have aired it. Which meant that it must be possible to open the window. They had also left a jug of water and a glass on the desk.

The footsteps faded down the corridor and she pulled the book from her jeans and put it on the blanket. Then she crouched to look under the bed. Someone had emptied and rinsed the pot.

She sat at the desk and took out her notepad and pen. Quickly she wrote down what Suzette had told her, filling in the gaps with her own thoughts and conclusions. Fatima had secretly collected Suzette. She must have known that something was likely to happen, and had wanted to get Suzette away from the Costa del Sol without anyone knowing. Why? Because she liked the girl, maybe. Because Suzette was her daughter’s best friend. Or did she have some other, less noble, reason? Was Suzette a hostage? In exchange for what? And from whom?

Her next thought made her stop writing.

If Fatima knew that Suzette needed to be saved, she must also have known that the Söderström family were in danger. She could be mixed up in the murders herself.

Maybe she was the person who had ordered them to be carried out.

Suddenly the walls felt even more restrictive.

Annika put her pen down and got up to try the door. Still locked, of course.

What if they didn’t let her out again?

What if they kept her here for ever?

Who knew where she was?

No one, except Muhammad, the taxi-driver from Tangier.

She felt her throat tighten and the classic symptoms of an approaching panic attack: tunnel vision, tingling in her fingers, utter terror.

She stumbled to the bed and lay down on her stomach, facing away to the side.

There’s no danger, she tried to persuade herself. If they really did want me dead, they’d already have killed me. Or they wouldn’t have let me in in the first place. Fatima may grow dope, but she’s not a murderer. That’s why she picked up Suzette. Fatima cares about people …

She lay there without moving for a long time, concentrating on breathing normally.

She should have grown out of these panic attacks by now.

She got up cautiously and went to the window. It was still locked.

She couldn’t see anyone outside. The skies had darkened: black clouds had rolled in from the Atlantic. They were going to have some rain.

She looked down towards the building below her. The top floor, where she was now, was more sparsely
decorated than the rest of the house, which suggested it was for servants, or had been added later. The middle floor seemed to be the main social part of the house. She didn’t have much sense of what was on the ground floor, but from the outside it had looked much more basic than the floor above. On the way to Asilah she had seen similar farms. Maybe this was the way houses were built in Morocco: you started with a fairly basic ground floor, then added to it as your finances allowed.

The building was huge, at least a thousand square metres. And parts of it were extremely lavishly appointed. This was a wealthy farm. It was quite clear that Fatima belonged to the premier league of hash farmers.

It was starting to get darker inside the room now.

She sat down at the desk, picked up the pen from where it had fallen to the floor, and started to make a list of the farm’s inhabitants.

How many people lived here? To start with, Fatima and her three daughters: Maryam, Sabrina and Amira. Maryam was married to Abbas, and had two little boys. They were probably who she had seen from the window that morning. Sabrina was at college in Boston. Zine, the foreman, and Ahmed, his son, must be the men with the guns.

Then there had to be servants: people who emptied chamber pots and worked in the fields. Zine the foreman had to have someone to be foreman over, after all.

She put her pen down and sat on the bed. She pulled out the book that Suzette had given her in the library, Siv Hoffman’s labour of love,
A Place in the Sun
. She pulled the pillow out from under the blanket and put it against the wall to cushion her back.

She opened the first chapter and started to read.

As she read about
The Princess in the Castle Among
the Clouds, The Little Troll Girl with the Matches, The Angel at Gudagården, Falling through the Sky, Death on the Beach
, and other strange tales, the Atlantic rain lashed the window-panes and the wind tore at the plants in the fields around the farm.

In the afternoon it was so dark in the room that she had to light the little lamp so she could finish the book. She read the last page and didn’t know what to think. Could that really have happened, or was it just a piece of fiction with literary pretensions?

A flash of lightning followed by a clap of thunder made her get up and look out at the mountains. They were completely black. More lightning chased across the sky, to the sound of rumbles and cracks. What would she do if a bolt hit the house and set it on fire?

She recalled the smoke and flames on the other side of her bedroom door in Djursholm, how she had opened the window and lowered the children in the bedclothes. Here she was trapped like a rat in a trap.

A terrifying crack of thunder shook the whole house, almost making her lose her balance. She screamed, took the three paces to the door and yanked at the handle. It was as unresponsive and solid as the door of a bank-vault.

She ran to the window and peered intently at the lock on the french windows. They opened outwards. The lock was part of the handle, in the middle of the windows, at waist-height. She pushed at it, hard. It didn’t move.

She looked down at the farm. The lights had gone out. A power cut.

She tried to calm herself. She’d never been scared of lightning before.

The house was made of stone and the roof was tiled, so it couldn’t be particularly flammable.

But it wasn’t the weather that was her main problem: it was her own foolhardiness.

She sat on the bed again and tried to think carefully.

Schyman knew she was on the Costa del Sol, as long as he had received the email with her articles. It wasn’t absolutely certain that they’d got through.

If there was any kind of search for her, then passenger lists and Passport Control would show that she had entered Morocco. At least they’d know which country she was in.

Her service provider’s list of calls made on her mobile would show that she had called Rickard Marmén, and he could lead them to the
muqaddam
in Asilah. And he, in turn, could tell them that she had been asking about Fatima’s farm.

So she hadn’t disappeared without trace, even if it had been incredibly stupid not to tell anyone where she was going.

There was a crack of thunder above her head and she ducked instinctively.

How long would it be before anyone started looking?

Monday at the earliest, when she was supposed to pick up the children.

There was another crash, not thunder this time but something else, a shorter, sharper noise from below.

She went to the window, leaned forward and peered down at the yard. The little lantern was reflecting off the glass so she moved it aside and blew it out. Then she huddled up and peered out through the bars of the
window. The gate in the wall was half open. The metal at the bottom was warped and smoking.

She frowned. The metal gate was actually smoking.

The bang had been an explosion. Someone had blown the lock off the gate.

She saw movement in the yard, black figures sliding through grey sheets of rain. Two, no, three moving towards the house. Then something flared and she heard a different sort of noise.

She gasped. They had guns and were using them.

She fought an intense impulse to crawl away and hide under the bed. Instead she pulled her dark jacket on over her pale T-shirt so as not to be seen. She pulled the hood over her hair and cupped her hands against the glass.

There was more noise, several shots this time, and fire was returned from somewhere inside the house. She heard a scream and one of the shadows fell: one of the intruders. Zine or his son must have hit him.

The two other shadows zigzagged across the yard, now firing constantly. The flashes from the barrels lit them so she could see their faces.

They were Europeans.

Another man fell, the one closest to the house. She saw him land on his back immediately below her window.

The remaining man stopped, pulled himself up to his full height, and seemed to be thinking. Then he walked calmly towards the house and disappeared from Annika’s field of vision. She waited, and after a short while he reappeared. He had someone else with him, a man or a child, and was dragging him by the hair into the middle of the yard where he let go. The youth lay squirming on the ground – it looked as if he had been hit by one of the shots.

Annika caught a glimpse of his face, contorted by pain and fear. It was Ahmed, the foreman’s son. The black-clad man leaned forward, aimed the barrel of his gun at the boy’s head and fired. Ahmed twitched, then lay still. Annika thought she was going to throw up.

The gunfire ceased. That must mean the foreman had been disarmed as well, and was possibly dead.

The man stayed where he was in the yard. She saw him lift his head and study the building in front of him, and leaped back into the room so he wouldn’t see her in the window.